Challenge 02: What is our time together actually for?

Hybrid working isn’t the problem but introducing it without deciding what our time together actually for, is.

Imagine someone commuting an hour into the office, sitting down at their desk, putting their headphones on and spending the entire day on Teams calls. At half four, they pack up and make the same journey home again.

It is a day that most of us recognise, and yet nobody deliberately designed it that way.

Last week, I wrote about how busyness can crowd out connection. This is where that busyness can do some of its quietest damage. When organisations are moving quickly, there is rarely enough space to stop and ask the obvious question:- what is our time together actually for?

Instead, hybrid working arrived, policies were written and new working patterns were established, but the more important question was often left unanswered.

The promise, and the peculiar disappointment

Hybrid working was supposed to give us the best of both worlds: the flexibility and focus of working from home, combined with the connection, collaboration and sense of belonging that come from being together in person.

Yet, in many organisations, it has not quite delivered either.

That is not necessarily because hybrid working itself is flawed. The problem is that we introduced it without being intentional enough about what should happen when people are working remotely, what should happen when they are together, and where different types of work and interaction are most effective.

The result is a peculiar kind of disappointment. People make the journey into the office only to spend much of the day on video calls. Teams come in on different days and discover that the people they most need to collaborate with are working from home. Managers assume that connection is happening simply because people are physically present, while employees are sitting behind their screens with headphones on, focused on meetings and deadlines.

The office, which was supposed to create opportunities for connection, can end up becoming little more than a backdrop for individual work.

Presence is not connection

Most of us recognise that a conversation in person feels different from one on a screen. Trust can develop more naturally when people are physically together, empathy is easier to pick up through the small cues that get lost online, and some of the most valuable interactions are the ones that were never scheduled in the first place.

It is the conversation on the walk to a meeting. The two minutes at somebody's desk. The discussion that continues over coffee after a meeting has officially finished. These moments may seem insignificant, but over time they are often the interactions through which relationships are built.

One of the people we spoke to during our research captured the opportunity cost of defaulting to video calls particularly well:

The challenge is that we can create the appearance of togetherness without creating the experience of it. People can be sitting in the same building without actually spending meaningful time together.

The contradiction leaders keep seeing

Almost every participant in our research raised the subject of hybrid working. What was striking, however, was that the concern was rarely that hybrid itself was the problem. The bigger issue was the lack of intentionality behind how it had been introduced and how it was being used.

One leader described their own organisation with real clarity. They had introduced hybrid working without first defining the culture they wanted it to enable. There had been no clear conversation about what people should actually be doing when they came into the office, or how that shared time could be used to strengthen relationships and connection.

Then the feedback came back: “When I come in on a Tuesday, I’m on Teams meetings all day.”

There was a policy, and there was an intention behind it, but the two had never really been connected. Managers and employees had not aligned on what being together was supposed to achieve.

That distinction matters.

Simply requiring people to be in the same place does not create connection. It creates an opportunity for connection. What happens with that opportunity is what matters.

The fairness problem nobody talks about

Several participants also raised an issue I had not expected to hear as frequently: the question of fairness.

When some people are expected to be on site most of the time while others have considerably more flexibility, connection can begin to feel uneven. Those who are always in the office can end up carrying a greater burden of physical presence, while those who are rarely there can begin to feel as though they are on the edge of the organisation.

Neither group necessarily gets what hybrid working was supposed to provide.

The people who are always present may not be getting meaningful connection, despite being physically there. The people who are rarely present may miss out on the informal interactions and relationships that develop more naturally in person.

So the challenge is not simply about where people work. It is also about how fairly opportunities for connection, visibility and belonging are shared across the organisation.

And that is not something a hybrid policy can solve on its own.

What to do about it?

Nobody wanted to abandon hybrid. They wanted to design it.

Five practical steps, with connection as an explicit objective.

Until an organisation, a team or an individual can answer "what is our time together for?", hybrid will keep producing the illusion of closeness without the substance of it.

Hybrid working does not need to be a choice between home and office. It can be a much more thoughtful decision about what each environment is best suited to and how the two can work together.

This article is part of our research series, Bridging the Connection Gap, exploring six challenges that make connection at work more difficult, and what leaders can do about them.